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Do conservative Republicans still believe in a strong national defense? Or are we all now neo-isolationists and libertarians who slavishly follow the siren songs of Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck and Ron Paul?
We’re about to find out, because Defense Secretary Robert Gates has issued yet another serious and substantive challenge to those of us who believe in an assertive American foreign policy backed up by the exercise of U.S. military power — including, notably, the deployment of U.S. ground troops overseas.
Gates’ challenge is this: He wants to further “reform” and cut the defense budget. Will conservatives and the GOP stand idly by (as they did last year) and allow this? Or will they substantively fight further defense cuts which promise to limit and constrain American foreign policy?
“Reform,” of course is unobjectionable. Who, after all, wants to spend money on Pentagon bureaucracy and administrative overhead? But the idea that real and significant cost savings can be achieved simply by cutting “fat” and excess from the defense budget is fanciful and illusory. No informed analyst or observer believes this.
Thus “reform” is really a public relations ruse designed to make palatable further cuts in the defense budget. It is, if you will, the proverbial lipstick put on a pig.
And in fact, Gates is quite candid and forthright about what is driving this latest round of “reform.” It is, as he notes, the need to cut the defense budget so that defense spending matches an artificially constrained top-line budget number.
“Given America’s difficult economic circumstances and parlous fiscal condition,” Gates said in a speech on Saturday, “military spending on things large and small can and should expect closer scrutiny. The gusher [of new defense spending] has been turned off and will stay off for a good period of time.”
In one respect, Gates is to be applauded for his purported attempt to impose fiscal discipline on the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy. Indeed, would that the Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Health and Human Services did the same.
But make no mistake: Gates is the Obama administration’s willing accomplice. He is part and parcel of an administration that is seeking to radically reduce defense spending as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) even as it dramatically increases spending on social-welfare programs and entitlements.
Indeed, the “gusher” of defense spending referenced by Gates is, in relative terms, anything but extravagant. Only about 20% of the federal budget, after all, is spent on defense. This translates into little more than four percent of the GDP. And yet, under President Obama, defense spending is projected to decline to less than three percent of the GDP — an historic low at a time of war.
Obama “is cutting the defense budget, both in real dollar terms and as a percent of the economy,” explains Heritage Foundation analyst James J. Carafano. “The average Pentagon budget for the period covering fiscal years 2011 through 2028 will be $50 billion less in real dollars than its current estimate for this fiscal year.”
But what is the first and most important responsibility of the federal government? It’s not to “give” everyone healthcare. It’s not to protect the “right” to abortion. It’s not to “save” the environment. It’s to “provide for the common defense” in an increasingly interdependent and dangerous world.
The Obama-Gates defense budgets, unfortunately, make this constitutionally-prescribed task more difficult. Consider:
(1) Just to maintain America’s current military force structure and personnel, the defense budget must grow at a rate of two to three percent above inflation. Yet, according to Gates, “realistically, it is highly unlikely that we will achieve the real growth rates necessary to sustain the current force structure.”
(2) The Pentagon’s biggest cost drivers are not weapon systems and modernization, but personnel and benefit costs, especially healthcare. Indeed, Gates reports that
healthcare costs are eating the Defense Department alive, rising from $19 billion a decade ago to roughly $50 billion [today. That's equal to] roughly the entire foreign affairs and assistance budget of the State Department.
Yet, there are no proposals on the table to reform, along market-oriented lines, the antiquated, state-run military healthcare system. And, as Gates rightly observes, whenever anyone proposes even a modest increase in premium and copayments, the politicians and the veterans’ lobbies demagogue the issue and it dies.
(3) To payoff the public employees unions, which rank among its greatest and most financially potent supporters, the Obama administration is acting to radically reduce the Pentagon’s use of contractors. The idea is that contracting jobs will be converted into civil service jobs.
Ironically, this is being done in the name of fiscal discipline and cost control. But as both the Heritage Foundation and the Lexington Institute have observed, it is contractors who ultimately save the government money.
After all, contractors come and go, but civil servants last forever. Their pensions and medical costs, for instance, are paid for throughout retirement by the federal government. That’s not the case, though, with contractors. (Full disclosure: I am currently part of a small contracting team that provides niche planning services to a small Pentagon planning office.)
(4) Gates wants to eliminate weapon systems cost overruns. However, the misnamed “Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009″ is the antithesis of reform. It imposes new regulatory straitjackets and bureaucratic decrees on both the government and private-sector industry, thereby stifling innovation and entrepreneurship in an already stultified acquisition system.
Conservative Republicans should accept Gates’ challenge. They should embrace the mantle of reform, but insist on significantly increased defense spending. They should propose a market-oriented restructuring of the antiquated — and increasingly costly — state-run military healthcare system; and they should demand that more money be spent on our ground-forces and ground-force modernization.
None of these real reforms will be easy to advocate for or implement. But if Republicans are to retain their historic edge on matters of defense and national security, then they had better start doing their homework. The Cold War, after all, ended decades ago; yet the GOP seems devoid of any new ideas. Time to wake up and get to work — or else lose big-time politically.
Gates is a smart man who really is fiscally conservative as opposed to those who say they are but who are willing to throw away billions on pointless, unneeded and anachronistic military spending. Obama cut spending for an airplane that the military said they didn’t want and didn’t need and the “fiscally conservative” right wing had a collective cow. They are not the slightest bit interested in reducing the budget.
I discovered recently there was a war tax to pay for WWII and a war tax to pay for the Vietnam war. Where was the war tax to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan? Nowhere. Bush CUT taxes and just borrowed the money leaving behind mountainous debt.
World War II is not going to break out again. Nor is the Cold War. We need to stop paying for the weapons to refight those wars and turn turn our attention to modern enemies.
Good, cut defense by 25% and you will just be making a start. Guardiano and the rest of the leeching war lobbyists need to find decent work to do. Milking the American economy has to stop some time, and now would be a great time to do it.
The USA spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined is stupidity of the highest order.
Time to slash and slash again. After all we are just passing this debt on to our kids and grandkids are we not!
There are not that many places the government can cut expenditure; Medicare, Social Security and the Military account for more than 74% of all governmental expenditures. You cannot touch Social Security since its a pay as you go system, and if benefits are cut reserves would be established for future generations (think of the Republican’s idea to privatize social security), interest eats another 8% of the budget. Discretionary expenditure is 18% of the budget (that’s all the other U.S. government expenditure). Since, the US government budget deficit is above 11% (on par with Greece by the way), Medicare an the Military have to be part of the solution.
Its that or higher taxes… Actually, it may even be both.
……Guardiano works in the defense industry so what is he going to say……..750billion buys a heck of a lot of national defense but two trillion wouldn ‘t be enough for Guardiano…..of course next week he’ll be screaming about the size of the deficit……..this is why it’s very hard to regard any of these folks seriously particularly when he finally proposes turning over large parts of the defense dept to contractors who had such a stellar record in Iraq.
Because of yahoos like Obama, our debt ceiling is going to keep going up until the lights go down in Washington and we’re putting bricks into the Great Wall of China. I’ve been buying gold since 2001 from goldcoin.net not because I need to make a million dollars overnight, just for peace of mind because with the debt, the $36 billion per day that our government is spending, and now this $1 trillion and growing for Obamacare…what’s next except soup lines coast-to-coast when the dollar crumbles and government programs go insolvent? We all need a safety net, mine is gold and I suggest everybody look into it today. The discount desk at goldcoin.net (800.394.3337) got me started years ago, even if you don’t buy from them they have a great free tutorial they will send to you, and no this isn’t an ad!
The writer is either uninformed about the realities of the defense budget and the cuts being sought, or he is deliberately hiding facts that run counter to his argument. I strongly suspect its the later. Regardless, lets look at Gates’ actual recommendations and the Pentagon’s real budget.
First, the writer never identifies and defends the weapons that Gates wants to cut. First, the F22. The F22 is a marvelous fighter, but it has many critics who attack its high cost to build and low cost to defeat (advanced countries have already figured out cheap ways to diminish the stealth advantage of US stealth aircraft, and russian SAMS may be quite effective against US stealth aircraft), its questionable dogfighting characteristics, gimmicky systems (the supercruise feature is great in theory, but the fuel cost is quite high (not afterburner high, but high enough), and range is a real problem with the aircraft), limited weapons load absent the addition of pylon mounted weapons, which negate the stealth characteristics of the aircraft.
How bout the JSF, another lovely looking plane. Well, JSF is massively expensive, and Gates doesn’t want to cut it, just to reduce the buy. He also wants to cut a second engine that Congress is requiring DOD to build, for no apparent reason (how building 2 engines, when the plane will only be produced with one, is not a spectacular example of government waste is beyond me).
Next, lets look at the Marines’ expeditionary fighting vehicle, essentially a big swimming tank that can launch from ships ‘over the horizon’ to attack defended coastlines. Gates’ point is that the purpose of the weapon – to allow large, valuable amphibious assault groups to stay many miles from shore, out of range of anti-ship missiles and other threats in the littoral like small boat swarms – has been rendered pointless by the great leaps in range, lethality and precision of anti-ship missiles in the years since the EFV was proposed. Ships now need to be so far off shore that the EFV simply can’t swim far enough to get to the beach. Gates’ additional point is that there are few conceivable conflict theaters where this sort of amphibious capability is necessary, a point the author does not rebut.
And how bout the Navy’s littoral combat ship, already a spectacular boondagle in the making. These ships, of which 50 will be ordered, are meant to replace the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates – nice, cheap boats designed to fill an escort role and therefore focusing on an anti-sub and limited air defense role. LCS is massively over budget (at 700 million a pop or so), and offers no real benefits over the OHP boats. It is lightly armed (at present, its just got a gun – the missile system planned for the ship was cancelled when it failed multiple trials), it has had hull issues, and it has a very poorly defined mission parameters. In short, it does nothing to enhance national defense.
Next, lets examine the writer’s rationale for fighting these cuts-most centrally, the argument that we are “at war.” This is absolutely true, but the writer does not acknowledge that the weapons systems the Pentagon wants to spend gobs of money on have no use in and are not at all designed for wars like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (or any other theater that could conceivably become part of the war on terror, except maybe-maybe-Iran). JSF? No more useful in Afghanistan or Iraq than the F15s, 16s and 18s we’re currently flying. F22? Same. Littoral Combat Ship? Due to its light armament, its actually less useful in the sorts of piracy fighting applications that might pop up ancillary to the war on terror. Marine EFV? Worse than useless in terror war theaters, as its flat belly and sides and relatively light armor make it very vulnerable to mines and IEDs. Future Combat Systems vehicles? Their light armor and emphasis on networking also make them no more useful – and possibly less useful – than current armored weapons systems like the Bradley, Abrams and Stryker. Weapons systems designed for next gen networked maneuver warfare just don’t add anything to the terror fight.
Finally, lets look at the author’s offhand dismissal of the value of efforts to reduce the “sprawling Pentagon beauracracy” by comparing it to HHS or HUD beauracracy. If only DOD had such small problems as those departments. DOD is a truly monstrous government machine, and the Pentagon is filled with paper pushers who add absolutely no value to the nation’s warfighting effort. These folks are all civil servants, but because they wear the insignia of rank, rather than the button downs of civilian government workers, they escape the author’s scorn. Yet they are very much part of the problem, bumbling along through power point after power point, committee after committee, doing nothing useful at all. There is lots of fat to be cut, and the efficiencies and security advantages that could be gained are legion. Billions is there to be saved. Sadly, the author is too beholden to the way things are to make any effort to thoughtfully examine the arguments behind Gates’ effort to impose adult supervision over DOD’s budget.
robertstrong // May 10, 2010 at 5:50 pm
“Because of yahoos like Obama, our debt ceiling is going to keep going up until the lights go down in Washington and we’re putting bricks into the Great Wall of China. ”
……What about that yahoo who took us from surpluses to the biggest deficits in US history and doubled the national debt?…..or were you concentrating on counting Kruger rands from 2001 to 2008
robertstrong.
Stop trolling this site and advertising your business here. If you wish to advertise buy some space. Or don’t you believe in paying for stuff?
It’s going to take cuts and tax hikes to get the USA out the deep hole it’s dug.
Excellent rebuttal redrod.
As any defense contractor (caveat: like myself) should know, the military is bloated, inefficient, and wastes money. I am a firm supporter of the military, but pointing out these wastes is important. Contrary to the writer’s assertion, weapon systems are the key driver of the pentagon budget. Procurement and RDT&E account for 220 billion dollars per year (out of a ~$700 billion budget).
Any fiscal conservative should recognize the importance of budget cuts in the military during this austere environment, especially on ‘yester-year’ weapon programs.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, ever rocket fired, signifies in a final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
A grab-bag of standard-issue right-wing rhetoric. I think I should be compensated for the time I wasted reading it.
Guardino and his buddies are defense parasites, “socialized defense” welfare queens.
redrod // May 10, 2010 at 6:03 pm
“The writer is either uninformed about the realities of the defense budget and the cuts being sought, or he is deliberately hiding facts that run counter to his argument. I strongly suspect its the later. ”
That sadly happens a lot on issues that make the. It’s more important get ahead of the countless opinion outlets, than to, you know, actually do a little fact finding first.
These kind of articles have no substance at all if you ignore the allocation of funds and the changes therein over the years, compared to a baseline. Or even worse, state that most of the funds is going to personel, as if that is the problem in itself. Of course most of the budget is going to army personel, it´s a stupid observation. And I find it quite insulting to be expected to accept such logic.
Important issues like the dynamics of the current war, compared to the more convential wars the U.S. has known are overlooked in most of the articles concerning this subject. Apparently “We’re at war” is a satifactory observation of the current situation.
In this kind of anti-terrorist warfare conventional military strenths such as the navy play a lesser role. Intelligence for example is relatively more important. But one still needs to guarantee military strenth in convential terms, for the long term. It’s a paradox in a way. They want to fight the “war against terrorism” from the perspective that it is an ongoing war. But at the same time, the military is required to focus on conventional defense, which is a totally different type of warfare.
While I support my military in every way I can, I am reminded of Eisenhower’s warning against the military/industrial complex and how that still applies today:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953
Large budgets for the sake of remaining the world’s police force run counter to what America stands for. Let the world pick up its own slack and see how well their socialist regimes run on the fumes of our military men and women pulling out of dozens of unnecessary bases around the world. I mean really, do we absolutely need a new military base in VENICE?
Reducing defense spending while increasing social-welfare is a great idea. I support it very much. Spending a trillion dollars on the 2nd war in the gulf has really produced nothing but death, suffering to millions, the murder of innocent women and children, and put Iran in the driver’s seat. We did add a trillion dollars plus and interest on it to the deficit. A trillion dollars spent on social-welfare actually helps millions of Americans. A return to sanity is much welcomed.
Eisenhower didn’t merely warn us about the growth of the military-industrial complex; he had a top tier marginal tax rate of 91% (not a typo), which permitted him to fund his own military spending without exploding the federal deficit. Those were the days when conservatives paid their bills.
Gates doesn’t have that luxury–the top tier rate is currently 35%. So he’s stuck: either propose cuts or call for higher taxes. Conservatives don’t call for higher taxes (despite the fact that our tax rates on the wealthy are near historic lows), so Gates, a conservative, proposes cuts. At least he is philosophically consistent.
But asking us to eviscerate the meager entitlements we have (relative to the rest of the developed word) to protect the militarism that Eisenhower warned us about seems to me immoral.
The Rudderless Right Must Rethink Defense and Oppose Obama’s Defense Cuts | NewsReal Blog // May 11, 2010 at 10:10 am
[...] John Guardiano’s latest post at FrumForum [...]
Gates’ reputation as pro-defense is vastly overrated. Note also his imposition of Political Correctness ahead of combat readiness, espirit de corps, and common sense to please the gay lobby and feminists. Also remember the asinine response to Maj. Hassan.
Conservatives should end their deference to Gates , re-define him as a defense-wrecking Obama puppet trying to turn us into an emasculated, weak Euro-power, and take the case to the American people for a strong military. The brass won’t be with us since they are systematically culled by the Senate Armed Services Committee staff to weed out true warriors and promote boot-licking diversity-cultists, but the military remains our nation’s most trusted institution and we must find the junior officers and retirees, and other concerned Americans, t oback us.
Indeed, the “gusher” of defense spending referenced by Gates is, in relative terms, anything but extravagant. Only about 20% of the federal budget, after all, is spent on defense. This translates into little more than four percent of the GDP.
Every time I see something written about defense spending by this author, I’m virtually 100% sure it’s riddled with bulls***, so let’s look at his figures and see if his track record is intact.
The federal budget for 2010 is expected to be about $3,550 billion. Defense spending for 2010 is supposed to be about $896 billion. GDP is expected to be $14,624 billion. So we have defense spending that is over 25% of budget and over 6% of GDP.
Maybe he meant 2009. The federal budget was $3,518 billion, defense spending was $795 billion, and GDP was $14,256 billion. So we have defense spending that is nearly 23% and 5.6% of GDP.
You always have to be careful of people like this who define “defense spending” as narrowly as possible, ignoring veteran’s costs, defense spending in other departments (like Energy and NASA), retirement benefits, etc.
Congratulations, Mr. Guardiano. Your record of misstating “facts” about the defense budget is intact.
Oh, yeah. And redrod ate your lunch, Boondoggle Boy.
Carney, you are right. Gates isn’t pro-defense. He is pro-america. And often cutting defense funding of extravagant and unneeded programs is patriotic.
Anonymous // Jan 7, 2011 at 2:06 pm
[...] Gates’ latest round of defense budget cuts. This is a story that we’ve been tracking for well over a year. The Obama administration, after all, came into office with an ideological commitment [...]